Better Forgotten
by bananafangirl
Summary: There is a reason John doesn't talk about his family or his past. There is a reason there are no pictures in his living quarters. There is a reason he'd rather just forget it all. That reason is dying. Some things are better left forgotten.
1. Prologue

**A/N: This is a rewrite of the fic 20 20 Hindsight because that one was not going where I had intended it to. I just didn't start it with enough of a plan. I like where this version is going a lot better.**

The inhabitants of Atlantis had, as a rule, done a fair job of turning the alien city into a home. Personal touches could be seen in labs, offices, and especially living quarters. Pictures, diplomas, and framed letters from home took up wall and desk space. Such touches gave the blank walls and lonely rooms a sense of being lived in, even when they weren't.

They were all distinctly missing in the room of Lt. Col. John Sheppard. The room was very much like the man himself. It gave the illusion of being lived in with its few stacks of DVDs, laptop, and guitar propped in the corner, but gave away very little at all about the person who occupied it. It was neat not because he tidied it but because there was simply not enough in the room in the first place to clutter if up.

The only truly personal touch to the whole place was usually buried at the back of a drawer in the bedside table, beneath a book and a stray _Sports Illustrated_. Out of sight, out of mind.

At that moment however, it had been unearthed from its hiding spot for the first time in well over a year and was clutched in very slightly shaking hands. It was a picture. Worn around the edges and wrinkled from being many times folded, the image remained clear. The faces of two children were preserved forever in ink, young and innocent as they hadn't been in years. Crouched between them and holding their hands was John. Free of wrinkles and the weigh of years and command, wearing a smile that for once reached his eyes and an ice cream moustache, he didn't much resemble the man sitting hunched over on his bed. They were, in a way, different people.

The man in the picture was part of a life he had left behind long ago. The last remnant of that life lay dying in a hospital bed in another galaxy.

John stared down at a little boy with an ice cream smile. In a sense, he was already dead.

The picture fell to the floor.


	2. Chapter One

The night before he was scheduled to return to Earth, John dreamed of home. Not the home he had come to know in the past years in the Pegasus galaxy, or the home of his childhood, but a home he had built and then left shattered and buried in his past with so many other things.

At first, it was of summer days and parks and children's laughter. Birthdays he was only sometimes home for, a puppy, teaching his kids to surf. _His_ kids. _His_ wife. _His_ home. How'd he ever manage that? It hadn't lasted. Later, he dreamed of a sick little boy and choking, smothering fear.

When he woke up, that choked feeling lingering in his chest, he wondered for a moment why he couldn't hear muffled crying in the dark. Nancy had cried every night for far too many months after Jake was diagnosed, and John hadn't known how to comfort her. But there was no muffled crying here, only the hum of Atlantis in the back of his mind, the lap of waves against the balcony leading off his room, and slowly his mind eased back to reality, but not completely.

Slowly, he got out of bed. His step faltered, feet skipping around a creaky floorboard that hadn't been beside his bed in years. His mind was in the past still, just enough that four steps left of the bed his hand met a wall instead of the panel to open the bathroom door. Shaking slightly now, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, he fumbled his way to the bathroom in the dark. The lights would have come on, had he wished them to, but he willed them off when they flickered. This room had been his for years now, he could find the damn bathroom.

The door slid open at his thought and he stumbled into the bright lights of the bathroom, as strange and alien as it was familiar. It wasn't tile that his hands clutched, white-knuckled, at the edge of the sink, and it wasn't _quite_ glass he stared into, watching a too-pale reflection stare back. There was an unfamiliar glint of tears, of wild sadness and a man in shreds that even he didn't recognize, but it was gone in a blink. And it was just John, staring back at himself. Just John. Not a father, not a husband, just a Lt. Col. in the Air Force. Just John smiled at the mirror, a little sadly and, as always, charming.

He didn't return to his bed that night. Instead, he wandered the halls of his 'home' until dawn, unquestioned by the soldiers on duty. When morning came, and with it his scheduled return to Earth, John didn't object to Ronon's presence at his side. No words passed between them, but none were needed, and the man followed him like a shadow through the Stargate.

**This took forever and was honestly not intended to be the entire chapter but for the life of me, I couldn't make anything else fit onto this without totally ruining the feeling, and I DO like the feeling in this, for once. (btw Val I BLAME YOU FOR THIS TAKING SO LONG! but ilu anyways bby)**


End file.
